The DevFS Summer of Code project is going into DragonFly this weekend; be ready for surprises if you update. It’s not complete yet; there’s a few more weeks for Summer of Code, but there’s other work that this code will enable.

For those people who use a variety of dynamic languages, but haven’t yet hit C: Just Enough C For Open Source Projects has a brief but comprehensive run through the basic parts. The page linked is about the presentation, but the slides are available on there as a tarball. (Via) I could have used this a few days ago.

Release 2.3.2 has been tagged, for anyone who wants to stick with DragonFly past the current release but before the recent radical changes to NFS. Check the commit message for a summary of what’s changed since 2.3.1, taken from the commit messages.

Matthew Dillon made some major changes to NFS, which have greatly improved speed. He’s also made the clients able to write asychronously, which can overwhelm a server because of this increased throughput. Be careful.

Michael Neumann has removed the PRISON_ROOT flag, and has changed jail(8) code to use only prison_priv_check() to check for allowed operations. This won’t mean anything from a user standpoint, but it does make programming easier.

The collection there is already huge (15K games), and visitors get to play whatever games they have on display. In my last visit, I played the arcade versions of Gauntlet, the standing and sitting versions of Star Wars, and Battlezone. It was awesome in a way that may only be apparent to people born before 1985 or so.

Colin Perceval has a good idea: if your employer uses open source code, show your appreciation to the developer(s) with some sort of freebie. (Via.) It’s much easier to prise a mug or t-shirt from a marketing department than to get money from a finance department.

The in-progress code for the Summer of Code project ‘DragonFly on AMD64′ has been imported; you can now build for SMP on AMD64, and complete a installworld/buildworld, natively. Modules don’t (yet) compile…

Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to version 1.0.0 and tcpdump to 4.0.0. (tcpdump site) I’d guarantee that having at least a passing familiarity with tcpdump will eventually, someday, solve an otherwise intractable problem for you.

Threading libraries libc_r and libthread_xu have been synchronized by Hasso Tepper; this shouldn’t cause noticeable issues. The potential issues he mentions for pkgsrc appear fixed, as I haven’t had any significant trouble (from that, at least) during bulk builds.

Alex Hornung is looking for suggestions on the userland tool(s) for his devfs project. This is a Google Summer of Code project, and I’m a bit late posting this, so hurry if you want to get your two cents in.

The recent importation of tmux into OpenBSD 4.6’s base system has led to someinterest; I haven’t used it directly but having a BSD-licensed session manager (if that is the right term) in the base DragonFly system would be nice.

There’s going to be a lot of kernel structure changes this week, as Matthew Dillon works on making more system parts multiprocessor-safe. Rebuild everything including your kernel, if you’re running bleeding edge DragonFly.

Hasso Tepper has some things he’d like to see for the next release, and he put them together in a wish list. His hands are full with pkgsrc, but if any of these projects look interesting to you, now is a good time to take advantage of the delay before the next release. (there’s already some work done.)

This blog post talks about the identified reasons Ubuntu has been so successful in growth over the past few years. The post uses it as a comparison to Perl, but it holds some lessons for DragonFly. Some items we have now – a Live CD, simple install, regular release schedule – and they’ve been very useful.

On the other hand, the available applications is something that can improve – as nice as it it to build from source, immediate installation of binaries is best. Heck, some companies basetheirbusinessaround it. Pkgsrc is getting closer to creating an “app store” for DragonFly. We’ve got a civil community, but I’d like to figure out ways to make it even more accessible.

(Nobody mentions this when talking about Ubuntu’s success, but having a large, privately-funded company backing your open source project also helps.)

While on the subject, I would love to have a job like Jono Bacon’s. He works with all the issues that I think about.

I’ve been traveling the past few days, so there’s a huge backlog of things to post. I’ll revert to bullets. Some of this stuff merits individual posts, but I need to clear out too much. I haven’t even reached my email yet.

Matthew Dillon is shifting the semiannual release schedule over by two months; new releases of DragonFly will happen in March and September. The current July-December releases hit right on major (U.S.) holidays and too close to quarterly pkgsrc releases.

The message linked above also contains a list of the surprisingly large quantity of work that will go into the next release, plus some details on booting strategies going forward.

The Google Summer of Code midterms are almost upon us. Starting July 6th (that’s next Monday), students and mentors will need to fill out a survey detailing how the project is going. There’s a preliminary version at Google Docs, so you know what to expect when they go up on the GSoC site. They will have to be completed by the 13th.

If you’re a student: make sure you have code that shows progress. If you’re behind schedule, cram.

If you’re a mentor: make sure you are aware of your student’s progress. If the student’s behind schedule, help them cram.